Hammurabi
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an early, if not the earliest king of Babylon. He is noted chiefly for the Code of Hammurabi, compiled about 2250 B. C. It is the earliest code known. The spirit of the laws is quite Semitic, suggesting kinship to the Mosaic Law. Representative rules are: If a man, in a case, utters threats against the witnesses, or does not establish the testimony that he has given, if that case be a case involving life, that man shall be put to death. If a man offers grain or money to the witnesses, he shall himself bear the sentence passed in that case. If a man rents a field for cultivation and does not produce any grain in the field, and does not perform the work required on the field, . . . he shall give to the owner of the field grain on the basis of the adjacent fields. If a man neglects to strengthen his dike . . . and a break is made in his dike and the water carries away the farm land, the man in whose dike the break has been made shall restore the grain which he has damaged. If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes death, the builder shall be put to death. If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction meet the requirements, and a wall falls in, that builder shall strengthen that wall at his own expense.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Two of Aiton's central claims have fallen. The date "about 2250 B.C." is now placed some five centuries later, around 1792-1750 B.C. on the conventional middle chronology, following the reconstruction of Babylonian king lists and astronomical records; and the code is no longer "the earliest code known," since the Sumerian laws of Ur-Nammu (published in 1952), the laws of Lipit-Ishtar and the Laws of Eshnunna are all older. Scholars also now doubt that the stele, found at Susa in 1901-02 and standing in the Louvre, functioned as a working statute book at all: it is rarely cited in the thousands of surviving Babylonian court records, and is read instead as a royal monument advertising Hammurabi as a just king. The clauses Aiton quotes are still translated much as he gives them, and the builder-put-to-death provision remains the most famous line in ancient law.
Written for this edition, 2026.